We proudly present our newest kid: the new bytemine appliance 6a16!

The facts: 6 Gigabit ethernet ports, 1.6 GHz Intel Atom CPU, 1 GB SO-DIMM RAM (can be upgraded to 2 GB) and of course it runs off a CompactFlash! Furthermore it features two USB 2.0 ports, a CompactFlash, a MiniPCI connector and two SATA ports.

Best news to that is: It is passively cooled and as all our products very low in power consumption (about 15 Watts idling, about 20 Watts on load).

The model is available as a barebone as well as with our bytemine openbsd appliance software. The 6a16 will become the new SOHO variant of our OpenBSD appliance line-up.

For included parts, more information and (of course) ordering visit our shop.

The direct links are:

With our software: bytemine openbsd appliance 6a16.

As a barebone: bytemine appliance 6a16.

As we just did a short remote-hands job in one of our server rooms, with me being in a remote location having to tell a Daniel (the newest addition to the bytemine team) when to disconnect and reconnect an external drive, I once again noticed how nice it is to have LC display on the bytemine openbsd appliances there. A quick demonstration:

hanah # lcdalert 10 "hey daniel" "" 
hanah # lcdalert 30 "please" "disconnect drive" 
hanah # lcdalert 30 "DONE" "THANKS" 

Nice, heh. A short extract from the manpage of lcdalert(8) to explain what it does:

Synopsis:

lcdalert duration line1 line2 [port]

Description:

The lcdalert utility submits two strings with alert priority 
to the server LCDd.  The line1 and line2 are the strings 
to be displayed by LCDd. Both strings are required.  
To omit one of the strings, quote an empty string.

I think, it is useful :)

Enjoy!

Like last year, bytemine sponsors the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage and we will again exhibit some of our products. The Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage will happen at the KITZ on the 2nd and 3rd of october. On the 2nd Bernd will give a talk about OpenBSD and the Web 2.x, since Bernd is very active in the Ruby and Rails on OpenBSD scene, he surely will deliver a very exciting talk!

As usual, we will show the current development versions of our products at our booth as well as welcome you to stop by and have a chat about our upcoming products with us.

Directions on how to get to the KITZ can be found here.

See ‘ya at the Kieler Linux und Open Source Tage 2009!

The guys from Amoocon made videos from all the talks and lectures and now they’re available for download. If you want to checkout my talk, the video is linked from this page.

Enjoy!

It’s been couple months since we announced the bytemine appliance and back when we announced the hardware, we said, it is the building block for a new product line. Here comes the next step!

The bytemine openbsd appliance!

It is built on OpenBSD 4.5 and includes a whole lot of additions, such as:

• ba-update(8) – a software-updater to update your installation with security- and bugfix updates provided by bytemine
• an extended bootloader to support the LCD
• software to make use of the LCD from within the operating system
  • lcdssd(8) to display status information
  • lcdexec(8) to interact with the keypad and execute commands from the keypad
  • mlcd(8), lcdinfo(8) and lcdalert(8) to display various data on the display
• rescue.rd – a rescue system which can be booted via the keypad
• printed manual and documentation of all extensions in man-pages

Through the above mentioned “ba-update” command you can easily update the appliance to always have the latest updates we release.

And for the german folks, here is a poster we did for the bytemine openbsd appliance release bbq last thursday:

The last two days I spent at the amoocon 2009 in Rostock. Stefan Wintermeyer (Founder of Amooma GmbH and Author of the Asterisk Book) organized the conference and asked me to give an OpenBSD talk. It was a get-together of quite a few big names of the VoIP scene.

The conference started with a keynote by Marc Spencer (Original Author of Asterisk and head of Digium, Inc.. Throughout the day the talks were very well done. The conference took place at the Radisson SAS Hotel in Rostock and Stefan and his team from Amooma did an excellent job organizing it. The quality and level of talks was good and the sourrounding made it fun to be a speaker. I was a bit surprised that this was the first conference sind 2005 were I actually did not know anyone (well, except for the person that got me there), but I guess there is not a whole lot of crossover inbetween the OS and VoIP scenes.

I was quite happy to hear that John Todd, community manager at Digium, is a big OpenBSD user. He uses OpenBSD all around his house with asterisk trunk on it. nice. Lenz Grimmer from MySQL (I’ll spare you the obvoious jokes about the “renaming” of his employer) gave two very interesting talks. One on MySQL HA and the other on Securing and backing up MySQL.

Today I gave my talk on OpenBSD in VoIP environments (on german). Apparently they made videos of all the talks, so I will link to that at some point. The slides for my talk are available here.

Well, if you have not gotten the news by now, shame on you :) OpenBSD has released its new version, OpenBSD 4.5. All the new things that are part of this release are covered pretty well in the release announcement, which is also linked from the corresponding Undeadly article!

Of course, this release is available from ftp.bytemine.net.

Enjoy!

I guess, I will be speaking at the Amoocon 2009. Amoocon is a conference on Voice over IP on the 4th and 5th of May in Rostock, Germany. I will be giving a talk on OpenBSD in VoIP-Environments.

Maybe I will see you in Rostock?

Some days ago Felix got interviewed by Tim Pritlove for Chaosradio Express.

They talked about OpenBSD’s technical features as well as the development culture within the OpenBSD project. So if you’re interested in OpenBSD and want to learn something about it, this podcast is for you.

The interview got released today. Have fun!

Where are you going to be the upcoming saturday? Well, we are definitly supporting the local Oldenburg event, 3. Linux Info-Tag Oldenburg. There will be an OpenBSD-related talk by myself, titled: Commercial deployment of OpenBSD.

Of course we will have a bytemine booth as well as an OpenBSD booth. We will have OpenBSD 4.4 CD-Release Sets and all the fan-boy stuff available!

If you feel like hanging out with the byteminers while meeting with other unix/linux people from Oldenburg, join the event!